As our institutions fail, they will take down many individuals with them.
Don't despair: the failure is systemic, not personal.

As the U.S. economy fails on a systemic level, it is pushing
individuals into a deep sense of failure. Feelings that one has failed one's
family and oneself can feed a despair profound enough to trigger thoughts of suicide,
and for many vulnerable people, thoughts lead to action.

In a terrible irony, those who do take their own lives are often those with
the highest sense of responsibility and highest personal standards; their sense of
failure is crushing in ways that less responsible, more laissez-faire people
cannot imagine.

The systemic failure of the U.S. economy is pushing many to the brink of despair,
as they interpret their own financial failures as personal rather than as the result of a
system-wide decline stretching back decades. The need to explain this systemic
failure is part of what drives me to write this blog day after day, month after month,
year after year--to help people understand the roots of our national and global failings.

Despite these multiple systemic failures, I am an optimist, and I wrote
Survival+ to not only illuminate the roots of our institutional
failures but to lay out guidelines for bypassing those institutions as they devolve and
collapse.

The Central State (Federal government) and the Federal Reserve are both failing
institutions. Their policies, assumptions and mindsets have only one end-state:
devolution and collapse. After the old institutions have imploded, some new
sustainable, honorable version may arise; this is possible but not guaranteed.
Nobody knows the future, and life is contingent.

Institutions are like organisms: they have a life-cycle and exist in a wider
ecology. Our current institutions are in the Failing Stage of their lifecycle, where
simulacra "reforms" and facsimiles of "change" are presented in lieu of true
systemic refomation.

This strategy is based in the institution's politics of experience: real
transformation would require their constituencies to lose some measure of income, power
and perquisites, and since every fiefdom within the institution will deploy all its
formidable resources to self-preservation, then real reform is rendered impossible.

I have addressed this numerous times over the past five years, for example:

The basic mechanism of this expansion and fatal resistance to reform/change is
"the ratchet effect": expansions of staff, reach, power and revenues are
frictionless and exciting--the cog wheel of bureaucracy advances easily. But when
the institution expands beyond its carrying capacity, beyond the efficiencies
reaped from advancing complexity and scale, i.e. to mission creep, bloat and sclerosis,
then any reduction in staffing, reach, power and revenues are resisted with iron
fortitude and the desperation of an organism fighting for its life.

I prepared this chart to illustrate the life-cycle of bureaucracy:

As revenue declines and pressure for real reform mounts, the embattled institutions
find that propaganda and facsimiles of reform are "cheaper" "solutions" than real
reform. This is the key driver behind the flood of propaganda, bogus statistical
"proof" of "recovery," and all the phony "reforms" laid out in 3,000 pages of befuddling
bureaucratic self-preservation.

Real reform would mean powerful constituencies would have to take real reductions
in staffing, power, benefits and in their share of the national income. Rather than
reveal this double-bind--reform is impossible but the Status Quo is unsustainable--the
institution deploys its gargantuan resources to laying down a smoke-screen of
bogus "reforms," distracting sideshows and ginned-up statistics to "prove" that
"we're really changing things around here, yes-siree, and things are getting better and
better, every day and in every way."

But it's all deception and lies. Nothing has truly been changed or reformed;
another layer of self-preservation has been added to an already bloated defense of
perquisites and power.

America's institutions are like stars about to go super-nova. They have increased in size
to the point where their mass guarantees that once their energy source
(as measured in fossil fuels and money) falls below a certain threshold, the
institution will collapse inward on itself.

Until then, the best that we can do is to avoid official entanglements, lower our
own cost basis, pay off debt owed to the Death Star Financial System and reduce our
dependency on the institutions which are currently expanding in the final stages before
they go super-nova and implode.

And don't take it personally if things fall apart around you.
We're all doing our best, but we can't control everything around us.

"This guy is THE leading visionary on reality.
He routinely discusses things which no one else has talked about, yet,
turn out to be quite relevant months later."
--Walt Howard, commenting about CHS on another blog.

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